1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to financial document proving, inscribing, and sorting systems, and more particularly to diagnostic apparatus for determining the print quality of indicia upon such documents after the documents have been subjected to a preselected number of passes through a simulated document reader.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As is well known, magnetic ink character recognition, or MICR, was developed in the early 1950s, primarily as the common machine language for bank check handling, when the American Bankers Association commenced writing specifications for a suitable system to be used with the then rapidly developing electronic business machines. Specifically-designed symbols, readily recognizable by any person who writes checks, are used for all numerals and zero with a few additional symbols being used for special coding purposes. To take full advantage of the system, it was necessary to modify to some degree the conventional shapes of the numbers, but generally the numbers can be easily read with the naked eye, thus serving two purposes.
As the MICR-coded documents pass a special reading head, the symbol is converted to a uniquely-assigned waveform, which with further electronic translation can be introduced into a data processing system. Other systems seriously considered by the American Bankers Association before final selection of MICR included binary or bar codes, spot codes, decimal systems, fluorescent ink, magnetic bar code, perforations and notches. The principal criteria against which each system was judged included accuracy, tolerances, printing practicability, customer acceptance, verification, cost, format, and resistance to mutilation and obliteration. For some applications, the well known OCR (i.e., optical character recognition) is preferred over MICR. Nevertheless, while each of the MICR and OCR approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages, the use of MICR in financial document proving, inscribing, and sorting systems is most prevalent.
One major drawback to the utilization of MICR-coded documents, however, is that during their processing by typical reader sorters (e.g., the IBM 1255 Document Processor, or other on-line multi-pocket high speed reader sorters such as the IBM 3890 or IBM 3895) the MICR-coded documents are subjected to high frictional forces when passing through the read heads of the reader sorters. Such high frictional forces tend to smear the magnetic ink, often rendering them unreadable by the reader sorters and thereby forcing the documents to be read and sort manually. As is readily apparent, therefore, it would be desirable to provide apparatus for testing the effects of high frictional forces on MICR-coded documents such that properties of the ink, paper, or process of printing, reading, and sorting the documents could be adjusted to ultimately provide a high quality, non-smearing MICR-coded document.
An easy solution to the above-noted objective would be to utilize reader sorters themselves, such as the IBM 1255, IBM 3890 or IBM 3895, or the processors disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,387,639 or U.S. Pat. No. 4,510,615, to test the effects of the high frictional forces that their read heads would impose upon the MICR-coded documents. Such a solution, however, would necessitate an undesirable amount of downtime from the reader sorter's regularly scheduled processing operations, and would be an extraordinary waste of money since the typical costs associated with such processors is in the range of a quarter of a million dollars. It would also be desirable, therefore, to provide apparatus for testing the effects of high frictional forces on MICR-coded documents wherein the apparatus would be dedicated to such testing and would be relatively inexpensive to manufacture and employ.